One of our most beloved bands to emerge most triumphantly from the Domino Record label, Wild Beasts are positioning themselves as a premier act in the making. Earlier this Fall, we declared, "it's so rare to hear anything that truly startles a listener into full attention, eyes wide in delighted surprise, a pulsing vitality and variety in a melody, a voice". From listen one of the band's sophomore release Two Dancers, we were madly in love with this young, English quartet. Naturally, we knew we had to capture one of their shows when the band strode through New York on a series of high-profile shows last month.

Filmed under the cover of the Mercury Lounge's moodiest of lighting, this video casts the band in an appropriately mysterious manner. Here selections from both Two Dancers and Limbo Panto, the album that preceded it, are recreated so true to form, it's startling. The band's shape shifting melodies, dense textures, sophisticated compositions, sky-high falsettos, libidinous lyrics; even on a dark, foreign stage performances of "This Is Our Lot", "The Devil's Crayon", " Fun Powder Plot", and "Hooting and Howling" leave no part of their music to chance, exquisitely recreating even the most modest characteristics of their recordings, ultimately upholding the band's lofty, ultimate vision in the process. It's a stunning thing to witness, and it's all for the taking in this incredible concert video. - David Pitz

Artist Bio

It starts with a simple nagging pulse, some sparse piano and Hayden Thorpe's opulent falsetto only here he's never sounded so haunted, threading through the skeletal arrangement and ominous spaces of 'The Lion's Share' as it almost builds into a crescendo but then, brilliantly, doesn't quite, maintaining instead its eerie tension until it evaporates. "It's a terrible scare," he sings, "but that's why the dark is there: so you don't have to see what you can't bear." For a brief delirious moment there's a tiny icy blade right through your heart, and it's clear that whatever our expectations of Wild Beasts, a band who've always gone their own strange, sweet way, they are about to be both confounded and exceeded.

'Smother' is the third album by Wild Beasts, four young men from Kendal who, despite journeying towards the centre of things, on a trajectory that took them from Kendal to Leeds to London, still make music that retains the outsiderdom and intimacy a childhood spent in the Lake District informed. Like its predecessors 'Limbo, Panto' and the Mercury-nominated, much-loved 'Two Dancers', it is a genuinely brave, beautiful record that stands outside the vicissitudes of fashion, and sounds like nothing so much as itself. If 'Two Dancers' was a night on the tiles, dizzy and giddy and pulsing with hedonism, then 'Smother' is pillowtalk. Intimate and sensual, it has the courage and confidence to talk softly, knowing that once it has the listener, it has them forever.

As 'Two Dancers' refined elements of 'Limbo, Panto' and veered off into uncharted territory, so 'Smother' explores the 'erotic downbeat' first hinted at on 'Underbelly' and 'When We're Sleepy' from 'Two Dancers'. For the first time on a Wild Beasts album, there are ten love songs. Often delicate, never wimpish. Born out of an intense six week period of writing in East London and a month recording in remotest Wales, the songs make most sense in each other's company - as a suite whose full force isn't felt until the final notes die away. These ten songs reflect a band certain only of themselves. Like all the best art, it isn't second-guessing its audience. It doesn't even know if there is an audience. It's born out of a moment of vulnerability (is anyone listening?) that, conversely, brings out the singular strengths of this most singular of bands. When they say "we never wanted to be four white boys playing guitar forever; we hope to be the kind of band that shouldn't exist," then you realise 'Smother' is the wonderful sound of four musicians being entirely true to their vision.

"All the best bands change shape," says Benny Little, and all four Beasts speak volubly of their love of Talk Talk, another British band whose gradual metamorphosis opened up extraordinary, impossible-to-predict vistas in their music. Along with Talk Talk, they've been listening to Beach House ('that record is like a hug'), Oneohtrix Point Never, Caribou's Swim. Listening to 'Smother', you can hear what drew them to those records: atmosphere, space, understated rhythm. It's these qualities in part that make 'Smother', as Tom Fleming says with a half-smile, "a more grown-up record. With all the perils and horrors that can bring It's less performative and more intimate."

Hayden says 'Limbo, Panto' "sounds like a 20 year old," and as such it reflected the brash youthfulness of its makers. "We're more familiar with our dialect now." There's a sense of fluid intuition at play here, between the four musicians and de-facto fifth Beast Richard Formby, that makes listening to 'Smother' feel like a privilege. As Hayden says while discussing Talk Talk "the best parts are unquantifiable."

Deeply personal, and as brazen in its fragility as 'Limbo, Panto' was brash and baroque, 'Smother' is like a candle lit in the teeth of a gale. Huddle round it, draw closer, get warm.

"I have to know how it feels and I am not afraid; this is the house we built all else falls away." Deeper.